Expulsions were carried out under a decision adopted by the Antifascist Council of the National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) on 21 November 1944, which took effect on 11 May 1945.
This day 60 years ago, following the notorious AVNOJ decision, 13,000 ethnic Germans and Austrians were expelled from their homes in Croatia, German community leader Nikola Mak said at a press conference in Osijek.
He said that between 3,000 and 4,000 Germans and Austrians had died as a result of difficult conditions in detention camps, and that 1,500 internees died in the Valpovo camp alone.
"Although the exact number of people who died in the camps is not known because all documents were destroyed, we assume that about 1,500 women, children and elderly died in the Valpovo concentration camp. Thanks to the priest Peter Fischer, who was also detained in that camp, we have the names of 1,076 people who were buried at the Valpovo cemetery," Mak said.
Mak was seven years old when he was interned in the Valpovo camp by Yugoslav communist authorities.
He said that only after the election of a democratic government in Croatia in 1991 did the public learn about "genocide that was committed against the Germans in the Danube region", notably in the camps in Valpovo, Krndija and Josipovac.
The main commemoration will take place on 14 May at the town cemetery in Valpovo, about 30 kilometres northwest of Osijek. It is the first time the German community commemorates expulsions of their ethnic kin during the communist regime.
"We observe the day of expulsion of Germans and Austrians in order to pay tribute to our ethnic kin who suffered in those senseless times as well as to all innocent victims of the Nazi regime," Mak said.
From 1944 and after the end of the Second World War, about 150,000 Germans and Austrians left Croatia or were expelled by Yugoslav communist authorities.